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About John Kmetz

John Kmetz retired from the teaching faculty of the University of Delaware (UD) Department of Business Administration in 2013. He had been with UD since 1977, and taught at both graduate and undergraduate levels. He taught international business, systems and process management, and business consulting; he also supervised Master’s student projects for the National Technological University.
He combined his academic interests with a wide range of experience. He spent two years as a proofreader and copy-editor in a printing company while working his way through a BS at Penn State. He took his MBA and Doctor of Business Administration at the University of Maryland. While doing his DBA he also worked with Leadership Resources, Inc., serving as Vice-President and a member of the Board of Directors from 1968 to 1978. He conducted many management development programs for both domestic and foreign clients since 1968, and continues to provide training and consulting through his company, Transition Assistance Associates.
His underlying approach to all of his work views organizations as dynamic systems that process information to accomplish their goals. This has been the foundation of numerous studies and consulting projects in the aerospace and defense industries. Since the 1970's he has done projects on logistics management and avionics maintenance for the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command and its contractors, other Department of Defense organizations, authored the avionics maintenance manual for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and has done studies to improve logistics management for operations and aircraft support. He has assisted many aerospace companies in preparation of technical proposals. He served as Faculty Director of the Basic and Advanced Project Management Certificate Programs for UD.
International business has been his other passion. He has served on three USAID projects with UD. In the early 1980’s, he managed a planning project for utilization of renewable energy in the Republic of Panama, on full-time leave to the University’s Institute of Energy Conversion for the first one and one-half years of the contract. In 1991 and 1992 he also took full-time responsibility as Director of Management Training for a USAID grant to assist business and economic transition in Bulgaria. In 2003 he wrote the winning proposal and was academic project manager for a $10 million USAID contract to establish a US MBA program in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, completed in 2008. He served as Faculty Director of International Programs for the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics from 2001 to 2010, and informally served in that capacity for 10 years prior to that. He has led many study-abroad courses and has taught with universities in France, Russia, and Bulgaria. He has served as a consultant to organizations in Bosnia, Britain, Bulgaria, Singapore, and Slovakia.
His research is related to his applied work. In 1998 he published a book on his US Navy research, an online book on business research in 2000, and has published many works in journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. His most recent book (2012) is a professional text on process workflow mapping and analysis. His current work is on the academic research enterprise, its lack of scientific validity, and its failure to support professional practice.
He is married, has two adult children and three grandsons, and lives in Newark, Delaware, USA.